The Moth

Over the last 2-3 weeks I have discussed on 3 completely separate occasions the subject of serving web pages from a CF application on a Windows CE device. Since ASP.NET is not supported on the Compact Framework, the question I get is "how to" and my answer is typically along these lines:

There are 3+1 options
1. Native Only
2. Managed Only
3. Hybrid
4. Wait for CF 3.0 (?)

1. The first option is basically not an option if you are determined to leverage your business logic, which is already written in C# or VB.NET. However, I always mention it because I think it is important to understand what the out-of-the-box options are on Windows CE. You can find them here.

2. The second option basically means writing your own web server (and hence not taking advantage of IIS on WinCE). This either makes faces drop ("Are you serious?") or produces smiles ("I am a control freak anyway so having complete command of how the web server works sounds great!"). Either way, you don't have to start from scratch, as others have been there before (use them as inspiration or just rip off their implementations).
a) Port cassini
b) Use the results of the Monash project
c) Port the ASP.NET MONO implementation (not aware of any *public* project that has achieved it, but there are some guys that have done it (ended up at ~1300KB) and if they want to go public with it I am sure they will - I cannot say anything else, I'm afraid)

3. If you followed my link when discussing the first option, you know that on WinCE you typically write an ISAPI extension for serving pages; imagine if from the ISAPI extension entry point (HttpExtensionProc) you could start talking to a managed dll that did the work for generating and returning the pages. Alas, unlike the desktop, hosting the runtime is not an option with NETCF. So what is it that I always offer as a poor alternative for hosting the runtime? Inter-Process Communication! So, to summarise the hybrid approach with CF 1.0/2.0: Write some C code that seats between IIS and a managed exe communicating via any IPC mechanism you see fit.

4. This is not a serious option for two reasons: Who in their right mind will wait for CF 3.0 when even CF 2.0 is not released yet (does anybody work for a company that looks that far into the future)? The second reason this is not a serious option is because nobody knows what CF 3.0 will offer! My hope is that the CF team will listen to requests on allowing us to host the CLR (this will make option 3 a breeze) or even better offer ASP.NETcf (and then I woke up :-)

Expect to read more on this topic here in the future, as I am looking at this feature for one of our products.